In the summer of 2007, then candidate Senator Barack Obama was rewriting the formula for winning elections with an organizing tool that, to my knowledge, is not being replicated today by any of the Democratic campaigns. Camp Obama. What was it exactly?
It's a camp for adults — mostly young adults and college students — who are hoping to hone their political skills and learn the basics of organizing for a certain barnstorming presidential candidate.
"Barack Obama is inspiring a new generation of people to come in, and a lot of people have not been involved in the political process before," says Hans Riemer, national youth vote director for the Obama campaign. "We are training them, teaching them how to be effective, showing them what their role is in our strategy to win the election ... We're taking people from raw enthusiasm to capable organizers."
What Obama was doing in Chicago (and eventually other cities) wasn’t a two-hour training seminar or something of that nature. You were literally being trained for 3-4 days. It was what separated Obama’s energized supporters from Dean’s supporters in 2004. In the article where Al Giordano predicted the Obama campaign would eventually overtake Clinton, he writes:
During a three-day training session of Obama volunteers — called Camp Obama — in New York this past month, the campaign's field director, Temo Figueroa, confronted the ghost of Dean's '04 crash head on.
"What's the difference,' he asked, 'what's the main distinction between the Howard Dean campaign and all that enthusiasm and all those big crowds and this campaign? What's the biggest distinction between the two? And I'll tell you. It's this. Howard Dean never did this. What is it? Training. Putting a large investment up front about the strategy, the tactics of how we win. We have now trained over 2000 people in Chicago. Two thousand people have gone through three-day, four-day trainings like this and are going back to their home states and developing field structures, organizing structures, in their congressional districts."
Eventually, the camps spread to multiple cities and organizers were grouped into teams to bring Camp Obama organizing top-down. Zack Exley writes:
Over the past two months, the Obama campaign has staged a number of in-depth, three-day trainings in February 5 states, with more than 1,000 carefully selected volunteers attending. Trainees leave the events organized into teams by Congressional district, charged with building an organization that reaches all the way down to the precinct level.
There’s been a lot of attention on enthusiasm and enthusiasm gaps, and it’s quite often you hear leaders telling their grassroots that elections and agendas will be won from the bottom-up. But what then candidate Senator Barack Obama understood is that while winning an election was bottom-up, training, organizing, and messaging was deployed top-down in a very disciplined manner. I don’t see something akin to Camp Obama with any of the Democratic candidates right now, but without it in 2007-08, it’s possible that Obama would never have defeated Clinton. Energy is great, but it needs to be directed smartly.
More importantly, this apparatus allowed us to mobilize not just for Barack Obama, but for the goal of securing Democratic majorities. Something we need right now not just at the federal level, but in state legislatures across the country. In my opinion, outlining a general strategy of how to secure Democratic majorities should be an actual platform issue on the candidates’ websites in detail.
I don’t feel like I’m part of a well-oiled machine this election cycle. I did in 2008.